my chocolate waffle

Something funny happened to me today. I didn’t go high on drugs but,

With earphones plugged, things around me begin to appear distanced. A particular encounter amplified that distancing. A sense of detachment, perhaps, that I've become a spectator, unrelated to the happenings around me. It would be easier for you to understand, if I relate it to watching a play or a movie - things just happen, and you simply observe, and at most think about them. I was queuing up at a bread shop to get this chocolate waffle (the green coloured ones, you know… you can either have it plain, or have kaya, peanut butter… etc spread on it). I waited patiently, or rather detachedly, for my waffle to be made. And I was watching two people behind the cashier talking. Judging from their apparels, they were workers at that shop. They were talking rather animatedly, one of them flailing arms and bumping up and down on tip-toes. Of course, I couldn't hear what they were saying. Their dramatic conversation, so convincingly alive yet, having not heard a word, totally incomprehensible, struck me, as if, that I was really simply a spectator and they were consequently mere actors/players. Like watching television with the ‘mute’ button pressed. I watched as the scene before me unravels.

Now that you get the hang of it, at least vaguely, I would want to explain it more precisely. Watching a movie, seeing things simply happening, was not exactly/precisely what I felt then. Because in watching a movie, there is still a physical barrier (i.e. the screen) separating us from that world behind it; In what I had just experienced just now, that ‘barrier’ was non-existent. I thought that it would perhaps be more apt to say, it felt that I was in a/ using a 'Pensieve'. If you know Harry Potter, you would probably instantly get what I mean – the experience in a Pensieve. Basically it allows us to experience something fully, short of really being there. To slap on a wiki for those who have not read Harry Potter, a Pensieve "allows viewers to fully immerse themselves in the memories stored within, much like a magical form of real world virtual reality".

Not that I’m in someone else’s memory…but for that moment, I felt like I was a spectator of my own memory, and passively letting things around me unravel, waiting to see what happens next.

Earphones unplugged, a nod, plus a ‘thank you’, things then dissolved to their normal state. I’m now actively being there. That ‘detached’ moment was lost and I felt painfully normal again – I wish I could get back to that passive observer state, experiencing my played-back ‘self’ in auto-pilot mode.

You must have experienced something similar before, no? What do you think?